Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer

by Russ Coffey

  This was how Betty Whyte met Sgt Olav Nilsen of the Norwegian Resistance. Olav was 6ft-2in tall, fair and rugged. He came over and rescued her from the unwanted attention of some RAF boys who had invited themselves to the table where she and her friend were sitting. Betty was won over by his gallant act and, afterwards, they walked off down the street together, hand in hand. It was March 1942 and she was 21.

  They got married a couple of months later on 2 May. Things almost immediately started to go wrong. Olav soon left in search of more excitement and, no doubt, other women. And whatever military value he might have had – no one seems to know – quickly expired. He ended up in a tobacco factory. This was entered as his profession on Dennis’s birth certificate. He was also known for drinking heavily in the town’s pubs. Betty stayed in her grandparents’ flat. But despite the unconventional marriage, Olav still managed to father three children by Betty. The oldest was Olav junior; the youngest was Sylvia. In the middle was Dennis, born on 23 November 1945.

  Olav senior took some interest in the eldest child but, otherwise, he didn’t take any of his responsibilities seriously. Later, Dennis would discover ‘Nilsen’ wasn’t even his real name. It was a pseudonym Olav had adopted for his Scottish adventure. Nilsen says this contributed to his poor sense of identity as a child.

  During his first decade in prison, Nilsen would look back over these early years like a detective in search of clues. In letters, he told me how he suspected his mother had been hiding things from him. Eventually, he became convinced that Olav wasn’t even his real dad. He thought that explained why he and his sister were treated differently, and how it was that, when Sylvia was born in 1948, Olav petitioned for divorce on the grounds of adultery. He believed that they had had a different father.

  As Nilsen stewed over his origins, his bitterness about his relationship with his mother festered. Increasingly, he felt that all his life she had been hiding important information from him. ‘Why will she not face me on any visit?’ he demanded rhetorically in one letter to me. In another fit of pique, he wrote, ‘Mrs Betty Scott is protecting herself from any hard and embarrassing questions in the future.’ Later in the letter, Nilsen remembers his mother losing her cool and shouting, ‘You wouldn’t know your father if you met him in the street.’ Why not, he wondered? There were plenty of photographs of him, after all.

  The more Nilsen reflected on his relationship with his mother, the more theories he developed. One was that his very existence reminded her of an affair, or worse … maybe a rape. That, he thought, would, at least, explain his mother’s reluctance to touch him and why she was so keen to dump him on the ‘cold practicality’ of Granny. Such thoughts helped Nilsen believe that his family really was partly to blame for his later problems. In a letter, he complained to me there was ‘only one villain’ in Brian Masters’ Killing for Company. His mother, he felt, should have been a close second, with his father not far behind. But of all the traumas Nilsen has given as reasons for his psychological warping, the one mentioned most often did not directly concern either.

  For many years, Dennis Nilsen considered the death of his grandfather to be the defining event of his early life. The incident happened when he was almost six. At the time, the family was still living in the grandparents’ flat. Nilsen remembers there being an unhappy atmosphere and continual arguments between mother and grandmother about how to look after the children. Even when things were quiet there was tension.

  Grandad, however, exuded a kind of calm, masculine serenity. It drew Dennis to him. Everyone noticed how unusually close they were. In her last television interview, Nilsen’s mother even held back a tear as she reminisced about how Dennis and Grandad would be seen walking around the town and looking at the boats in the harbour. She said at weekends they would fly kites down by the beach. Her heart was warmed by the sight of them together – it helped compensate for the lack of a real father.

  In October of 1951, Whyte, uncharacteristically, started complaining of extreme tiredness. He quit choir and missed church, but still he carried on working. One day, we hear, he went out to sea looking particularly seasick. The next morning, he failed to appear up on the deck. His crewmates went to his bunk to wake him; they found him dead. It was 31 October and he was 62.

  Nilsen first described this day soon after his arrest. It wasn’t just the death, he said, but also the cold, emotionless way the news was broken to him that caused his emotional scars. One day he remembered running around amid the normal bustle of everyday life and the next his mother was telling him to go and see Grandad ‘laid out’ in his coffin.

  Grandad’s body was displayed in the front room. Apparently, no explanation was given as to what had happened nor to what it meant. Grandad just lay there in a cheap, plain, wooden box. In his book, Nilsen tells us the undertaker had dressed him in white long-johns and his weather-beaten face looked like it needed a shave. When little Dennis asked why he looked so strange, the response received was that it was because Grandad had ‘gone to a better place’. Nilsen says this shocked and confused him. He felt he was being asked to accept things he couldn’t comprehend. Would he see his grandad again ‘when he was better’ he wondered? If not, then why did Grandad leave? What does it mean to be dead?

  Nilsen’s initial account led Brian Masters to conclude that seeing his dead grandfather started the boy’s personality problems. He believes that while Grandad was laid out, death and love became fused in his mind. To make matters worse, simultaneously, his inner world became totally separated from his outward personality.

  Nilsen encouraged this theory: ‘My troubles started there,’ he told Masters, ‘it blighted my personality permanently. I have spent all my emotional life searching for my grandfather and, in my formative years, no one was there to take his place.’ But now he says he previously overstated the importance of the event. Whereas it was once the defining event, now he is more inclined to consider it to be merely part of a jigsaw – the other elements were his poor mothering, the rejection of his difference by his contemporaries, misdirected sexuality and a sense of utter worthlessness.

  There is also more to Nilsen’s re-evalution of his grandad’s passing than just readjusting its importance within a general scheme. His whole attitude towards the man has changed. Anyone familiar with the hazy memories of Grandad reproduced in Killing for Company would immediately notice a radical change in tone in his autobiography. His fond memories have all but disappeared. There’s no ‘being borne aloft on the tall, strong shoulders of my great hero and protector, my grandfather’, or being rescued by Grandad’s ‘Magic Sponge’.

  The reason for this change in attitude is that Nilsen now thinks there may have been more to his grandfather’s apparent kindness than he realised as a little boy. After careful reflection, he believes his grandad may actually have been a ‘hesitant’ sexual abuser. This is reflected in the new accounts he gives in History of a Drowning Boy. For instance, he says, ‘He would take me out on long walks over the sand dunes and golf links … On the dunes at the far end of the bay, near the stream flowing into the sea … he would take me out into the dark, slit-windowed pill box and take down my short pants and hold my penis and told me to urinate … Tired by the long journey, I would, invariably, fall asleep and be carried home … My conscious memory is of his strength and a feeling of comfort and security. These were my only real, one-to-one, personable physical contacts with someone who took a beneficial interest in me. He may have been a tepid paedophile, but I do not remember him as threatening or oppressive.’

  In a later chapter, Nilsen elaborates on his grandfather’s ‘special’ interest in him. He wonders if, during the long walks he remembers so well, his grandfather may have drugged his tea, and possibly inserted his finger in his anus. He feels this might explain why, as a young boy, he was fixated with defecation. More recently, Nilsen has discussed his new memories in letters exchanged with psychologist Matthew Malekos. The conclusions have been that, as a young boy, and irrespec
tive of any actual sexual abuse, Dennis had conflicting feelings of love and fear towards Grandad. Sometimes the old man could be fond but, on other occasions, he was tyrannical.

  As such, young Dennis’s feelings towards him may have been a mixture of love and hate. If so, Grandad’s death would have prompted both grief and guilt. Malekos suggests that unresolved childhood feelings of ‘control and domination’ may even have been present in Nilsen’s mind when he murdered. It’s an intriguing idea, but without any corroboration as to another side to Andrew Whyte’s character, it is pure speculation.

  Once Grandad had died, it was Dennis’s mum and granny who were left to bring up the three children. Nilsen’s feelings towards his grandmother at this time are almost as ambivalent as those towards Grandad. In 1983, he wrote in Killing for Company:

  …the wireless played ‘Workers’ Playtime’, ‘Have a Go’ and ‘Music While You Work’, and while Mother went about her seemingly endless washing and housework she sang along with all the popular tunes. The open coal fire burned in the grate with a folding metal guard over it, with always something drying on it … It was a crowded but happy room. Mum being on her own was a dab hand at interior decorating. She had become self-reliant in her daily struggles to make ends meet. There was always lots of washing hanging … [after church] we would return to Academy Road for Sunday dinner. Granny would prepare all the food the day before as she was loath to do anything on the ‘Lord’s Day’. I still have not known anyone to make a Scotch broth as good as Granny.

  In History of a Drowning Boy, this wistfulness has all but gone. Granny now takes her place alongside his mother as one of the ‘shrill’, ‘domineering’ women who helped make the small flat in Academy Road such a cold and uninviting place.

  Lily Whyte – Granny – died in 1990. At this time, Nilsen had been in the habit of writing autobiographical notes in a diary. In History of a Drowning Boy, he expands some of these thoughts to explore his confused feelings towards his grandmother. He talks about ‘the drab, grey life of dear departed Granny’. Then he wonders what kept her going until she was 96. His visual image is of a hard-bitten fish-wife who never stopped to think, in case thinking made her realise the tragedy of her life. He concludes that for all her good intentions, she suffered from emotional paralysis that knocked any gentleness out of her.

  Betty, Olav, Dennis and Sylvia finally moved out of Granny’s house in 1954. They travelled a mere couple of streets away to a flat above what is now a florist’s shop in 73 Mid Street. The move marked the end of a period when Nilsen claims he would spend lonely afternoons wandering the mile-and-a-half down to the beach to be alone with nature. Common sense, however, suggests that such stories were exaggerated.

  Whether or not Nilsen was really allowed to wander all around town as a young boy, life certainly changed when a local builder called Adam Scott started to court Nilsen’s mother. His presence brought increased structure to the household. Betty Scott would later say it made another depressing council house feel like home. They were married six months later. Life with three children had readjusted Betty Nilsen’s priorities for a partner. Reliability was now prioritised over glamour. Adam Scott was thick-set and of average height with receding hair. He worked as handyman for the council and if he didn’t have much money to bring in, at least he was honest and determined to treat his stepchildren as if they were his own.

  Nilsen’s book swiftly deals with his mother’s remarriage. He doesn’t want to attach much psychological significance to the upheaval it caused. Still, he does admit to being upset by the lack of affection he received, and that was a reason to resent Adam Scott. In particular, he talks about disgust at hearing his mother and Scott making love, which they did with ‘rapt abandon’ producing four babies ‘practically one after the other’. Soon, however, Nilsen says he stopped blaming Scott. He decided that if his mother didn’t show him love, then that was entirely her fault. And once he realised this, he says in History of a Drowning Boy, he started to pity Adam Scott in the face of his mother’s domineering character:

  My stepfather was a semi-literate, shy, County Council labourer who was completely dominated by my mother. He had a quiet personality and violence and malice were completely against his nature. She wore the pants in the house. She would often goad him into ‘doing his duty’ (as the man in the house) with oblique taunts questioning his potency in being reluctant to beat we kids for misdemeanours.

  Nilsen omits any mention of his mother’s claim that now he went from withdrawn to disobedient. And that wasn’t just at home – he also received cuffs around the ear from the local constable. Instead, Nilsen just tells us how cold his house-proud mother was. And, during this period, it seems Betty Scott did fail to show Dennis proper maternal love. She herself admitted so, saying that during 1954 she found it almost impossible to hug him. No amount of self-admonishment seemed to change this. There was just something about his difficult, unresponsive nature that prevented her from wanting to touch him.

  When things became uncomfortable at home, in his piece called ‘The Psychograph’, Nilsen says he liked to imagine himself as a ‘Saturday matinée hero’. Although having his head in the clouds was typical, the accompanying details are, again, less convincing. He says, for the ‘first and last time’ in his life, he joined a childhood gang who took part in the ‘full range of schoolboy antics and adventures’. His friends, we hear, were ‘inquisitive, daring, and mischievous’. He would have us believe that they sailed boats, built rafts and scaled rocks. But the water in which this was supposed to have happened was the very water of which even hardened fishermen were wary. Eventually, however, Nilsen says he tired of these children and their ‘dull aspirations’.

  Now, Nilsen says, he started to look increasingly to his imagination and animals for company. There were two boys he did still get on with – Farquar Mackenzie and Malcolm Rennie. Together, they would go to abandoned air-raid shelters to find fledglings. The three of them would make nests for them in fish boxes and shoe boxes. Nilsen’s favourites were called Tufty and Jocky. One day, when the boys went to play at the shelter, they discovered some local tearaways had killed the pigeons. With a display of emotion absent from later life, Nilsen says he sobbed his eyes out. A similar occurrence happened when his rabbit died of cold in its hutch some months later. The animal’s pen had been outside in the back yard.

  In History of a Drowning Boy, Nilsen complains bitterly that the reason such things happened was because his mother wouldn’t allow animals inside the house. In interviews, she would say it wasn’t practical to keep them. But Dennis was always convinced the real reason was because she didn’t share his love of nature.

  Nilsen’s relationship with animals recurs throughout his writing. He calls himself a ‘critter person’ and said to Matthew Malekos: ‘I like them, and they like me.’ Even as he wrote those lines, he was being kept company by budgies in his cell. But the dynamic between Nilsen and animals is more complicated than simple affection on his part. From his manuscript, we now learn that that, when younger, there were occasions when he wanted to be cruel to animals.

  The act of deriving sexual pleasure from hurting creatures – known as ‘zoosadism’ – has been observed in a number of serial killers. It’s often seen as a precursor to violent sex attacks. Nilsen’s new confessions about these moments of cruelty, however, don’t sound as though he’s trying to copy something he’s read. He writes with the same detached confusion as with his murders, as if he simply can’t explain his actions. What his behaviour shows, though, is that as early as the age of nine, Nilsen’s ability to empathise with any other creature was badly malfunctioning.

  In History of a Drowning Boy, he says: ‘In 1955, I did something which thoroughly ashamed [sic] me, then as now. I slipped a wire around a friendly cat’s neck [in a disused toilet]. I pulled up the cat by the wire attached to the cistern pipe. It struggled briefly under the wire. After it was dead, I prodded it and turned away disgusted by my own cruel behavio
ur. I wanted to see the reality and process of killing and death. I was not excited by the act.’

  Shortly after the cat incident, Nilsen finally escaped the harsh atmosphere of Fraserburgh. The family moved into a larger council flat in the village of Strichen, a small village about eight miles inland from Fraserburgh. There is a short main street with a few streets running parallel to it. The focal points are a couple of pubs and a village store and, like Fraserbugh, most of the buildings are in the granite style.

  The family’s new address was 16 Baird Road, and it was where Nilsen spent what many would assume to be the most formative years of his childhood. Nestling at the foot of Mormond Hill, Baird Road is one of Strichen’s nicest streets. Its houses stand out by being faced with red stone and are generously sized. Although Nilsen never says so, one imagines it would have been a comfortable place to grow up. And, most importantly, although the village was dull, it was not hard like Fraserburgh.

  Nilsen, however, gives the impression of disliking both the village and his school. The teachers weren’t much better than those ‘schoolmarm spinsters’ in Fraserburgh who would bully him with mental arithmetic or make him feel like a ‘scruffy urchin’. He resented the way his mother spoke to them. Nilsen claims she would kowtow to any figure in authority. Others simply remember Betty Scott just conscientiously trying to make everyone understand their financial circumstances. One teacher, Melita Lee, said that when there was a school trip to Belmont Camp in Perthshire, Nilsen’s mother offered all she could afford – 10 shillings – and even though it fell short, the school accepted it.

  Melita Lee was one of the locals who remembered Nilsen best at the time of the arrest. She considered him hard-working, able, very good at art, but with no interest in sport of any kind. Academically, she thought he was probably B stream. Nilsen’s mother thought he was mainly in the C class – the lowest. Still, she was proud of his artistic talents, especially the day he managed to get higher marks than Bruce Rankin, who went on to teach art in a local school.